


Such Marvellous Things

by longwhitecoats



Category: Moonlight (2016)
Genre: Brief allusion to canon consensual underage sex, Love, M/M, Poetry, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 03:53:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13045932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longwhitecoats/pseuds/longwhitecoats
Summary: Chiron and Kevin, driving.





	Such Marvellous Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opheliahyde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opheliahyde/gifts).



Time returns in colors. The road stretches ahead into a bright breath of sky, clean against the mess and rush of humanity like Juan’s old car coming up the drive, full of the buoyancy of surprised hope; Chiron’s eyes lift from the road for a moment into the past, tracing that long passage down the driveway and out to the surf, where he learned for the first time how to exist in the middle of his feelings without sinking. The depth of space beneath him seemed to hold infinite kindness, infinite patience, and the big broad hands beneath him bore him through the waves until he could feel the strength of his own arms.

He twists the wheel, licking the metal over his teeth. Juan’s car always smelled metallic too, a sharp clean blade scent cutting through the humid Miami air. Like Kevin’s breeze, blowing through the old heavy streets, stopping everyone in their tracks. Stopping time.

In the passenger seat, Kevin is tracing his fingers over the veins of the map. Neither of them have traveled this far north before, never seen these exit signs and neon portents, places that no one they love has ever gone until now. This time, time is still around them, rising and falling with the slow motion of their hearts, slipping in eddies of choice and uncertainty into tributaries of decision, flowing on and on and down along the road.

Kevin’s glances light up the lanes as the sky darkens, two headlights on the dim highway, bearing Chiron forward into the unknown. He thinks of all the boxes they brought from Miami, of Kevin’s old rundown place in Miami, and then a wall in another house, a longer ago past, a blank wall with no TV and bold lines of paint running sharp down the side of the wall where no one bothered to finish the color, a bare white socket and a blank face, his or his mother’s, or his, in the mirror above the basin of ice, nose bleeding bloody and bashed. Kevin’s hands tracing the map are the same knuckles, the same hands on him, the same hands on his past down by the beach in the soft sand: a memory so big with night that its darkness seems possible to sink into, fall into, to bear him up, a vast and patient darkness of time, moving with them now in this northbound car, holding them up in the middle of the world.

Now Kevin’s hands are holding a book that Chiron bought for Kevin Jr., a hardback square book with big bright letters that say LANGSTON HUGHES. They will give it to him when they all meet up together with Sam in their new city, because Kevin Jr. likes books and because Chiron likes it when Kevin Jr. smiles.

Kevin opens the book and reads:

> Out of the dust of dreams  
>  Fairies weave their garments.  
>  Out of the purple and rose of old memories  
>  They make rainbow wings.  
>  No wonder we find them such marvellous things!

The flickering iridescence of Kevin’s tongue sends sparks through the car, burnishing each word, a soft summoning of feelings Chiron forgets sometimes that he can feel, and he wants to reach out a hand,

and instead Kevin reaches out a hand and touches Chiron’s leg. Holds there. Just regards him for a minute. Chiron sneaks a glance away from the road. Kevin’s there, face patient. Hair going grey now, just a little. Just around the edges, a new color creeping in.

He looks like he’s about to say something.

“You’re gonna like New York,” Kevin says.

Chiron says, “Yeah.”

The hand stays, warming his leg, for another twenty miles. Everything is night-touched now, dreamy and isolated in pools of light along the road, floating between earth and stars. Miles fall behind them, run before them, and the music becomes static, and then silence.

Kevin’s wearing the same shirt he put on when they went back to that apartment months ago, the same threadbare thing with old buttons sewn on, that brittle moment when he said what he said and Kevin’s eyes burned into him and he didn’t know how to be. That moment when he bent his neck and felt at last that touch on the back of his head, like a balm, and they could hear the familiar noise outside rising and falling. The same shirt, the same mended sleeve, the same arms inside that embraced him that night and every night since, night after night.

Somewhere in the passing of time this moment too will become a color, purple and rose like a bruise or a kissing mouth, and it will fade into the swallowing dark of memory only to be rescued by a glance or a touch or a song.

It seems like a mighty long time, Kevin’s humming to himself as they drive through the night, a bass rumbling rumble beneath the hum of wheels on pavement. It seems like a mighty long time.

And when they arrive, when they park in their new town in their new house in their new time, when the future comes at last, Chiron will lift that shirt from Kevin’s shoulders along with every care in the world. They will leave the boxes in the back seat of the car and only bring in a bag or two. They’ll blow up an air mattress and buy milk, and the next day they’ll buy food and walk the streets, and then they’ll build and build a life, stretch out their arms over the emptiness before them and bear each other’s weight, hovering over the darkness of the past and stretching toward the openness above. This, Chiron can see. One color, vast and measureless before them, big and broad. And every day of their future, Chiron will hold Kevin close, breathe with him, his beloved, until the grey spreads through the black and their aged love becomes again the brassy purple-and-rose of youthful passion, and together rising and falling, rising and falling, at last they will rest by the boundless blue blue of the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem Kevin reads is called "Fairies," by Langston Hughes. It's part of his series of poems for children.
> 
> Many many thanks to my marvel(l)ous beta readers, Dr. Whom, [Oliviacirce](http://archiveofourown.org/users/oliviacirce/pseuds/oliviacirce), and [Toft](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft).


End file.
